UpPromote and Refersion both handle referral tracking, commission management, and payouts. If you’re launching your first affiliate program, either one looks like it’ll do the job.

The differences show up once you start comparing pricing mechanics, platform compatibility, and how each tool helps you actually find affiliates. We’ll break all of that down – and flag where both fall short if your affiliate program is part of a bigger creator strategy.

UpPromote vs. Refersion at a glance

UpPromote is built for Shopify brands that want to launch an affiliate program at a low cost (to begin with) with strong fraud protection and MLM support. Refersion is better suited for brands selling across multiple ecommerce platforms that want cookie-free tracking and the option to eliminate transaction fees at scale.

The problems with both tools are:

• Neither lets you manage influencer campaigns alongside your affiliate program
• Both require affiliates to sign up before you can track them
• Neither tracks the content your affiliates post
• Both charge transaction fees on top of monthly pricing (though Refersion offers a path to 0%)
  

Modash handles all of that – creator discovery, content tracking, influencer + affiliate management, product gifting, and payouts – in one Shopify-native dashboard. Here’s how the three compare:

Try Modash for free.

UpPromote has a more generous free plan, but pricing is similar in paid plans

UpPromote’s free plan is more generous – you can set up one program, track referrals via links and coupons, and access fraud detection. But you’re capped at 200 referral reviews per month, can’t list on the UpPromote Marketplace, and have no way to automate payouts.

Refersion also has a free plan, but it only allows you to list your brand on its marketplace. You can’t track sales, pay affiliates, or run your program in the free plan.

While UpPromote’s free plan is more functional, both tools have similar offerings in the paid plans: each charges a monthly subscription plus a percentage of affiliate-driven sales. In that, too, though, UpPromote is more cost-effective, starting at $29.99/month (+ 2% of referral sales). Refersion costs $39/month (+ 3% of affiliate sales).

The transaction fee decreases as you move up tiers on both tools, but Refersion’s annual Scale plan drops the fee to 0% for stores under $1M GMV – something UpPromote doesn’t offer at any tier.

Neither tool is sufficient on its own, though. You’ll still need separate tools for:

• Finding relevant affiliates
• Managing influencer collaborations
• Tracking the content your creators post
  

That’s where you might consider a tool that covers more ground at a single price point – like Modash. Modash starts at $199/month and you get creator discovery (380M+ profiles), content tracking, affiliate + influencer management, and payouts in one Shopify-native dashboard.

The best part? Modash charges you nothing for paying out $10,000/year to influencers and affiliates. And even after that, Modash doesn’t take a cut of your affiliate sales, it charges you based on the affiliate payout (5%).

Let’s say one of your affiliates brought in $1000 in sales at 10% commission.

• UpPromote will charge you $20 in addition to the subscription fee
• Refersion will charge you $30 in addition to the subscription fee
• Modash will only charge you $5 (provided you’ve exceeded $10k payouts in the year)
  

Try it for free for 14 days (no credit card required).

Bottom line: UpPromote has a more generous free plan. But once you’re on paid plans, the pricing structures are close. That said, Refersion offers the option to eliminate transaction fees entirely for stores up to $1M GMV.

Refersion works across multiple platforms, while UpPromote is Shopify-only

UpPromote is built exclusively for Shopify. If your store runs on Shopify, the integration is smooth – install the app and you’re tracking referrals within minutes. But if you sell on any other platform, UpPromote isn’t an option.

Refersion supports a wide variety of ecommerce platforms – including Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, Magento, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Stripe, and Chargebee.

If you’re an agency supporting multiple clients across different ecommerce platforms, Refersion is the only option.

UpPromote does offer product gifting that Refersion doesn’t, though. You can send free or discounted products to affiliates as welcome packages or performance bonuses.

The catch with UpPromote’s gifting is it only works for affiliates already registered in your program. You can’t send a product to a creator you discovered on Instagram who hasn’t signed up with your brand on the tool yet.

Modash’s Shopify integration handles gifting differently: creators don’t need to be in your system, so you can send your product gift link to any creator you want. They can choose their own items (up to a max value you set), generate promo codes and affiliate links, and track clicks, redemptions, and revenue per creator – all synced to your Shopify store automatically.

Bottom line: if you only sell on Shopify, both tools integrate well – and UpPromote is the only one of the two that offers native product gifting through your Shopify store. If you sell across multiple ecommerce platforms, Refersion is the only option that supports multi-platform tracking.

UpPromote and Refersion primarily support inbound affiliate recruitment methods

Both UpPromote and Refersion give you ways to attract affiliates – but almost all of them require creators to come to you.

UpPromote and Refersion have a marketplace where you can list details of your affiliate program and creators can apply to work with your brand.

Both tools also offer a post-purchase widget to turn customers into affiliates.

But in both tools, there’s no way to proactively search for affiliates. You publish your program and wait for applications. Refersion’s marketplace has 6.6M affiliates. Once you start filtering by location, niche, engagement rate, and brand fit, the pool of relevant creators narrows. UpPromote says it themselves:

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Refersion also has an AI-powered Discovery feature (currently in Beta) that recommends affiliates matched to your product categories and target audience. While this is a step toward outbound recruitment, it’s still matching you with people already in the Refersion network – not searching the broader creator landscape.

To find enough relevant affiliate partners as you scale, you’ll need a discovery tool like Modash. It has every creator on the planet with over 1k+ followers – that’s over 380M potential affiliates. 🤯

You can use filters – like audience demographics, engagement rate, niche, location, brand collaborations, and more – to find creators who match your criteria to a T.

You can also use AI search to describe the kind of creator you’re looking for, or find lookalikes of your best-performing affiliates.

Your affiliates don't need to be signed up to any marketplace for you to find, vet, or outreach them.

Affiliates need to sign up to UpPromote and Refersion before you can track them

Even if you use a third-party tool for affiliate discovery, you’ll need to ask your creator partners to sign up to UpPromote or Refersion so you can track their performance. This can be a friction point for creators who are managing multiple brand partnerships and are required to sign up to unique tools to partner with each company.

On Modash, creators don’t need to sign up anywhere to partner with you. You can find them, vet their profile, do outreach, track their content, and measure performance – all without asking them to get onboarded. They only need to create an account on Modash if you choose to pay them through the platform.

Bottom line: UpPromote and Refersion both have marketplaces, not databases. Refersion also has AI-powered matching, but you’re still fishing in a pool of creators who’ve already signed up. If you want to find affiliates proactively at scale, you’ll need a separate discovery tool.

UpPromote supports multi-level marketing, Refersion doesn’t

Multi-level marketing (MLM) lets your affiliates recruit other affiliates – and earn a commission on the sales those recruits generate. This is an excellent feature if you’re trying to grow your affiliate program through your affiliates themselves. Plus, it’s a good incentive for affiliates to earn more.

UpPromote supports MLM on all paid plans. You can configure multiple levels of commission (e.g., an affiliate earns 10% on their own sales and 3% on sales from affiliates they recruit), and the auto-tier system can move affiliates between programs based on their network’s performance.

Refersion doesn’t offer MLM features.

Bottom line: if recruit-a-friend commission structures are part of your growth strategy, UpPromote is the only one that offers it.

UpPromote and Refersion are suited to manage affiliate collaborations only

If you’re managing different types of influencer collaborations along with your affiliate program, you’ll need a separate tool to manage them. Refersion and UpPromote don’t allow managing various kinds of partnerships under one tool.

So influencer outreach, paid partnerships, giveaways, product gifting, everything needs to happen in another tool. And then you need to reconcile your performance data from affiliate and influencer collaborations if you’re reporting on them together.

If you want to find influencers, vet their audiences, track the content they post, and manage all creator payouts without switching tools, Modash handles that in one Shopify-native dashboard. You get:

• 380M+ creator profiles across Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, searchable by audience demographics, engagement rate, niche, and more
• Automatic content collection as creators post – including Instagram Stories – without requiring any authentication from the creator
• Affiliate link and promo code management, product gifting, and sales attribution synced from your Shopify store
• Communicate with all kinds of creators by simply connecting your inbox
• Payouts in 36 currencies across 180+ countries

Bottom line: UpPromote and Refersion manage affiliate programs only. If you’re also running influencer campaigns, you need a separate tool for discovery, outreach, content tracking, and performance measurement.

UpPromote has more built-in fraud protection, Refersion takes a simpler approach

UpPromote offers fraud detection at two levels – signup and sales – across all plans.

At the signup level, you can:

• detect multiple registrations from the same IP within a configurable time window (and choose to block or flag them)
• enable spam signup detection that checks for bot-like behavior
• hide your registration form from search engines
• restrict signups to specific countries
• block specific emails via a blocklist

At the sales level, you can:

• detect duplicate referrals from the same IP within a set period and choose whether to block or flag them
• permanently block sales from specific IPs via a blocklist
  

Refersion’s approach is different. It automatically deduplicates conversions – if a sale is attributed via two methods (like a referral link and a coupon code from different affiliates), Refersion auto-unqualifies the duplicate so only one affiliate gets paid.

You can also exclude affiliates from earning commission on their own purchases. Beyond that, Refersion recommends screening affiliates manually, reviewing conversion reports regularly, and waiting past the return period before approving payouts. There’s no in-app IP blocklist or automated signup fraud detection.

Bottom line: if fraud prevention is a priority for you – especially if you’re running an open registration program that attracts a high volume of signups – UpPromote gives you more automated tools out of the box. Refersion handles the basics (deduplication, self-referral blocking) but leans more on manual review.

Refersion uses first-party tracking without cookies, UpPromote uses cookie-based tracking

Both Refersion and UpPromote track affiliate sales via referral links and coupon codes. The underlying tracking technology is where they differ.

Refersion uses first-party tracking that doesn’t rely on browser cookies. When a customer clicks an affiliate’s referral link, Refersion records a click and attaches a unique cart ID to the shopping session. That cart ID is matched to the order data when the customer checks out.

This means tracking works even when browsers block third-party cookies or users have ad blockers enabled. Attribution is last-click, with a configurable attribution window.

Beyond links, Refersion offers three additional tracking methods:

• coupon code attribution
• customer email attribution
• SKU-level tracking
  

UpPromote, on the other hand, uses cookie-based tracking. When a customer clicks an affiliate link, a cookie is saved in their browser for a configurable period.

If the customer returns and purchases within that window – even without clicking the link again – the affiliate gets credited. If the cookie expires or the customer switches devices or clears their browser, the attribution is lost.

UpPromote also offers two unique tracking methods beyond links and coupons:

• Connected customer: link a customer to an affiliate permanently for lifetime commission, regardless of how they return to buy
  
• Connected product: link a specific product to an affiliate, so any sale of that product credits them
  

These override all other tracking methods.

Bottom line: if tracking accuracy in a privacy-first browser environment matters most, Refersion has the edge. If you want granular manual control over who gets credit for what, UpPromote gives you more options.

Neither UpPromote nor Refersion tracks the content your affiliates post

Both tools track clicks, conversions, and revenue – but neither shows you what your affiliates are actually posting to drive those numbers.

This is a big gap if you care about:

• ensuring affiliates are following brand guidelines and ad disclosure rules
• knowing which content formats and messaging drive the most sales
• repurposing high-performing creator content for your own channels
  

Modash handles content tracking automatically. As soon as a creator posts, Modash collects the content (including Instagram Stories) and saves it to your campaign dashboard.

Your creators don’t need to submit posts, connect their accounts, or authenticate anything.

Bottom line: on both UpPromote and Refersion, you see that a sale happened, but not what content drove it. If understanding which content performs matters to your program, you’ll need a separate tool to track affiliate generated content.

Refersion vs. UpPromote: which one should you choose?

After the analysis above, you should have a good idea of which tool is better suited to run your affiliate program.

Choose UpPromote if:

• You want a functional free plan to test affiliate marketing before committing
• You need multi-level marketing to grow your program through your affiliates
• Fraud prevention is a priority and you want automated tools out of the box
  

Choose Refersion if:

• You sell on platforms beyond Shopify (BigCommerce, WooCommerce, Magento)
• Cookie-free, first-party tracking matters more to you than cookie-based attribution
• You want to eliminate transaction fees entirely as you scale

A third choice: Modash

UpPromote and Refersion both handle the mechanics of running an affiliate program – tracking, commissions, payouts. But if your affiliate program is part of a bigger creator strategy, you’ll hit the same walls on both tools.

• Neither tracks the content your affiliates post 
• Neither lets you find creators proactively from a database
• Neither offers influencer management alongside affiliate tracking
• Both require creators to sign up and get approved to partner with you
  

Modash is built for brands that want all of that in one place.

• Track their content automatically as they post – including Stories
• Search 380M+ creator profiles to find affiliates who actually fit your brand
• Pay affiliates and influencers from the same dashboard in 36 currencies
• Send product gifting links, generate promo codes, and attribute sales back to individual creators, all synced natively with your Shopify store
  

Your creators don’t need to sign up for a marketplace or create an account to partner with you. They only need a Modash account if you pay them through Modash.

‍Try Modash free for 14 days – no credit card required.